A small architectural firm led the design of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo
By Nate Berg | Published: 2025-11-03 11:15:00 | Source: Fast Company – co-design
With over 100,000 artifacts dating back thousands of years, a floor area of approximately 900,000 square feet, a site spanning over 120 acres, and an estimated total price tag of over $1 billion, it’s not a stretch to call it The Grand Egyptian Museum Outside of Cairo, Egypt, the most important museum project of recent decades. It’s the kind of blockbuster building that would make the brightest architects salivate at the chance to lay claim to what will likely become one of Egypt’s most visited tourist attractions.
So, in hindsight, it is somewhat unexpected that the architecture firm that won the international design competition for the museum in 2002 was a little-known office from Ireland with no completed projects to its name and employing only three people.
Based in Dublin Heneghan Peng Architects He was virtually unknown when his concept was unanimously selected from more than 1,500 submissions as the winning design. “We didn’t build any buildings,” says Roisin Heneghan, the company’s co-founder. “We had one project just started on site when we won the competition.”
A lot has changed since then. An initial target opening date for the museum was set in 2007, but numerous delays caused by the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring and the Covid pandemic continued to extend the timeline. The Heneghan Peng Architects design is now fully built, and will be open to the public from November 1.
Thousands of years of history
The design of the Grand Egyptian Museum is a sprawling spread of aircraft hangar-sized courtyards, sculptural landscapes, conservation workshops, and a network of underground storage facilities. The museum building itself is a cavernous space housing 12 main galleries and direct views of the Giza Pyramids.
The expansive entrance hall sits under a tall, serrated roof that doubles as an open-air pavilion, shading the ticket area highlighted by a 30-foot-tall statue of Ramesses II that is more than 3,000 years old. On the façade, throughout the landscape, and even within the building shell, pyramidal shapes abound.
According to Hennigan, the focus of the design is not the main building but the museum site itself. “People used to tell us, ‘Westerners, you’re all fascinated by the desert, but Egypt is about the Nile River,’” she says. This prompted the architects to first think about how the museum fit into this dichotomy.
With a location chosen near the famous pyramids at Giza, on the fringes of Cairo’s urban footprint, it was clear that the museum would be located in the middle space between the desert and the Nile Valley, a space carved by thousands of years of river flow. “There is a 50-metre level difference between one side of the site and the other, because that is where the desert meets the Nile,” says Heneghan. “When you go out of the city, you see the pyramids on the plateau. So what we decided was that the museum should never rise above the level of the plateau, but rather it should be located between the plateau and the Nile Valley.
Although the large ceilings are capable of supporting towering statues, the building sits low to the ground, with a fair amount of its mass sunk into the landscape. The design of the Grand Egyptian Museum uses large corridors and views inside the museum to give visitors a microcosm of the sprawling history represented in the galleries.
The first part of the museum that museum visitors see after entering is a long staircase lined with thousands of artifacts, coffins, and statues that trace the entire 4,000-year period of Egypt’s Pharaonic history. It’s a crash course on foot for most international museum visitors before reaching the summit where more discrete parts of Egypt’s ancient history are explored in greater depth. that it Main exhibitions Covering topics such as kings and queens, religious belief systems, and ancient Egyptian society, the museum houses a wide range of antiquities Artifacts from the tomb of King Tutankhamun. The museum’s design allows each of these galleries to stand alone, but with visual links to other galleries in order to connect them to a broader arc of history.
“The galleries are themed, but at the same time you can see across different points, so you can make connections across the entire time scale,” says Heneghan. “That helped organize it.” If we had tried to make it on a human scale, I think we would have found it more difficult
Engineering achievement
The architects also had to deal with the reality of designing such a massive structure in the heat of the Egyptian desert. In part, due to the operational costs of running such a space, they designed the galleries to draw daylight from side nooks interspersed with metal shading structures and overhangs. This approach also works with the collections on display. “It’s a very large amount of stone,” Heneghan says. “And stone works well with natural daylight.”
To handle the enormous weight of the statues on display, the building has incredibly thick concrete floors, which also serve to regulate the building’s climate, absorbing cool night temperatures and slowly releasing them during the heat of the day. “What we were trying to do was create a really heavy structure, like a church,” Hennigan says.
Although Heneghan Peng Architects are the design architects for the Grand Egyptian Museum, they had a lot of help in realizing the idea. Even in the competition phase, once they were selected as one of the finalists, they sought additional help from engineering firms Arup and Buro Happold. Cairo-based consultancy Raafat Miller along with Heneghan Peng Architects are credited as the project’s architect. Given the numerous delays that have hampered the project, Heneghan says her firm has had little involvement in the design since it was largely completed in 2009. “Once construction started, we weren’t really involved in it,” she says.
The project has evolved since then, with new structural, technological and material changes necessarily altering the overall design. Heneghan says the building’s facade represents a departure from the more conservative approach of the initial design, but she accepts that some modifications were inevitable. “You know, 16 years is a really long time,” she says.
But there are also parts of the finished museum that were among the architect’s initial ideas for what this museum could be, back in 2002. Heneghan seems grateful that key elements like the grand staircase leading to the main galleries and direct views of the pyramids made it through after all these years. “Some things are pretty much what they were envisioned,” she says.
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(tags for translation) Architecture
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